Carlsberg Foundation Visiting Fellow
Junior Research Fellow, Linacre College
Dr Vibe Nielsen is funded by the Carlsberg Foundation and affiliated with the Pitt Rivers Museum and Linacre College at the University of Oxford as Junior Research Fellow. Her research focuses on processes of decolonisation and changing curatorial practices at the Pitt Rivers Museum and le Musée du Quai Branly in Paris.
As a postdoctoral researcher she has conducted fieldwork in the United Kingdom, France and Italy. The latter in her capacity as Visiting Fellow at the Danish Academy in Rome.
She wrote her PhD thesis Demanding Recognition: Curatorial Challenges in the Exhibition of Art from South Africa (2019) as part of the Global Europe research project at the Department of Anthropology at the University of Copenhagen. Through anthropological fieldwork, as well as historical and museological methods, her PhD thesis examines contemporary curatorial practices in South African museums and art galleries. She continued working on these issues in her postdoctoral affiliation with the department (2019-2020) and has recently published her analysis of the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa in Cape Town in the anthology Global Art in Local Art Worlds – Changing Hierarchies of Value (2023), which she has co-edited with Professor Oscar Salemink, Dr Jens Sejrup and Dr Amélia Corrêa. Her article In the Absence of Rhodes: decolonizing South African universities (2021) in the Ethnic and Racial Studies Journal vol. 44, no. 3 is similarly based on her doctoral fieldwork in South Africa.
Before her appointment as PhD Fellow at the University of Copenhagen, Vibe Nielsen worked at the National Museum of Denmark as Curator of Public Programmes. She received her master's degree in Museum Studies at University College London in 2012 and her master's degree in Modern Culture at the University of Copenhagen in 2015. In the final thesis of her MA in Museum Studies she explored the dissemination of the British involvement in the transatlantic slave trade in museums in London and Liverpool. This was an aspect she researched further in the final thesis of her MA in Modern Culture, where she analysed how Danish and British museums in different ways are dealing with their countries' colonial pasts. She further holds a BA in European Ethnology from the University of Copenhagen from 2010.
More information on the Pitt Rivers Museum website.
